Professor Henderson: DARPA Young Faculty Awardee for 2012

James Henderson, assistant professor and bioengineering graduate program director for the Syracuse Biomaterials Institute and the Department of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering, was selected for the 2012 Young Faculty Award (YFA) program by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). “The goal of DARPA’s Young Faculty Award program is not only to provide funding for young faculty researchers, but also to inspire them to serve their country by contributing their talents to help solve some of the most challenging problems of our time, from vaccine production to cybersecurity,” said DARPA Director Regina E. Dugan. Professor Henderson’s work is driven by the increasingly complex challenges of orthopedic reconstruction of injured extremities injuries in war fighters, a direct result of improved survival rates due to advances in body armor. The award will support his research of the unique shape-changing properties of shape-memory polymers to address the limitation of previous synthetic bone graft substitutes.